Backup/Restore/Recovery strategies

Hi

After reading the backup/recovery docs I am still quite confused, because there are so many points discussed, so that it becomes really difficult to find out, what are the important points in all these texts.

I'm interested to hear about backup/recovery strategies for a similar system configuration which I have here: Oracle 8.0.5 for Linux, DB-server with RAID-5 configuration, database running in archivelog mode.
I think of periodically and automatically doing whole database backups to a tape, either hot or cold backups (probably the latter, since it's currently no problem to shutdown the db during the night for doing the backup).

The first question is whether to use the recovery manager to backup the database or operating system features. Using RM seems not be trivial for somebody which is unexperienced, at least the docs give me that impression. Additionally since the RAID 5 configuration itself already cares for a high reliability I currently can't see any negative points in using OS features for backup. Can anyone with similar configuration give some hints whether this is OK or not?

Does anyone know whether to find an easy-to-understand tutorial of how to restore/recover a database? The Oracle docs are from my POV not easy-to-understand, unfortunately, additionally I'm still working with the free version of Oracle (will purchase the commercial version ASAP) which doesn't contain Enterprise Manager which is referenced all over the Oracle docs. And since I can't find the Server Manager documentation I really don't know how to exactly restore/recover a database safely.

bye
--
Sam Jordan Received on Thu Apr 15 1999 - 08:18:45 CDT